John W. James

Where were you when I needed you?

The saddest question we ever hear is, "Where were you when I needed you?"

That's what people ask when they find out what we do in helping grievers. We're presenting helpful and accurate information on this site, at the time you need it most, with the hope that you'll never need to ask that question.

It's an honor and a sad privilege to be addressing you, knowing that each of you has recently experienced the death of someone important to you. We also know some of you are reading this because of your care and concern for someone who is confronted by the death of someone important in their life.

We bring our personal experience in dealing with the deaths of people who were important to us, and our professional know-how in helping grievers for more than 30 years. We'll help you distinguish between the "raw grief" that is your normal and natural reaction to the death, and the equally normal "unresolved grief" that relates to the unfinished emotions that are part of the physical ending of all relationships.

A basic reality for most grieving people is difficulty concentrating or focusing. With that in mind, we asked Tributes.com to print our articles in a large type font to make them easier to read. Sharing our concern for grieving people, they agreed.

Ask The Grief Experts

Your Relationship With Him Was About How He Lived His Life AND About How He Died (Published 7/16/2013)

Q:

How does one reconcile an an overdose of a child (27) that was unintentional?

A Grief Expert Replies:

Dear Toni,

Thanks for your note and question.

Your one-question note is short, but it certainly provokes many other questions.

We'll assume that the child was a young man, and that he was your son.

If you’re referring to an overdose of illegal drugs, and that it was indeed your son who died, then there’s a clear implication that as a 27 year old, he may have been involved in a disease of addiction/dependency of some proportion.

We don’t say that to judge him, but to suggest that if that’s true, your relationship with him was more than about how he died. It was also about your entire relationship, which will have included all the degrees of difficulties in dealing with someone who struggled with an addictive disease.

The key is not how he died—intentional or accidental—but THAT he died. We will guess that your heart is 100% broken, and would be in either case.

Also, we want to address the issue of trying to “reconcile” the event. The dictionary defines reconcile as: to cause (a person) to accept or be resigned to something not desired

We don’t think you ever can really reconcile what happened, though life forces you to resign yourself to the reality of it.

Rather than reconcile the event, we encourage you to take actions to become as emotionally complete as you can with the relationship you had with your son before his death; to become as emotionally complete as you can with how the death happened; and, to become as emotionally complete as you can with all the now-broken hopes, dreams, and expectations you had for your son's future and your presence in that future.

The actions we recommend are in The Grief Recovery Handbook [available in most libraries and bookstores]. As you take those actions, you will begin to feel emotionally complete, and with that, a reduction in the pain you probably have been feeling. That doesn’t mean that you will never be sad or miss your son, but there will be a shift that allows you to move forward in your life, even though the death has dramatically affected you.